is that a brioche in your pocket, or are you just happy to feed me?

I have a love-hate relationship with the Food Network. on the one hand, bobby flay is the man. iron chef is a study in creative problem solving its own right. and chopped is what hell’s kitchen would be if it had any class (minus the kitschy title). on the other, I find it incredibly self-serving to think we have the resource to program a tv channel with new ways to actualize the lowest rung of Maslow’s hierarchy of need for an entire 24-hour period, seven days a week.

food porn is one of the guiltiest pleasures there is, but lust promises what it can’t deliver. so when we’re looking for that next great culinary innovation, we start to lose sight of some basic truths about what God gave us for our enjoyment.

erwin mcmanus likes to say the more we have of something, the more words we have to describe it. for instance, we have a number of ways to describe snow: ice, sleet, freezing rain, hail, slush, powdery, packy, fluffy, flurry, blizzard, avalanche (and about 20 others).  and yet it’s all about precipitation that sticks to the ground.

same with food. for instance, how many ways can you make shrimp? turns out, there are a lot of ways. but if you lived, say in haiti, or burundi, just how many options do you have in comparison to the U.S.A.?  not as many.

maybe shrimp is an extreme luxury example. so let’s talk about cheeseburgers: some three billion people in the world live on less than two dollars a day. that means half the world’s population lives on less than what we can get for $2 US on the value meal at mcdonald’s, burger king or wendy’s. put another way, every seven seconds, somewhere in the world a child under the age of five dies of hunger, as Americans throw away 14% of the food we purchase.

while those same three billion people survive on less than $2 US daily, the average American teenager spends nearly $150 a week. as we consume 400-600 liters of water per day in the U.S.A., one billion people do not have access to clean water.

while I worry about whether the wifi is free at mcdonald’s, 1.6 billion people in the world have no electricity at all. of those, nearly 100 million are denied basic education, while we debate about how the sopranos ended, or if jack bauer will finally die and save us all the hassle of watching another 24 hours of formulaic rehashed action television.

the statistics are so mind boggling, they are difficult to grasp. maybe that’s why we don’t talk about the fact that the cost of solving world’s clean water problems was roughly the same amount of money Americans spent on Black Friday, 2007.

we have so much resource at our disposal. so much disposable income, and so much leisure time that we have more names for it than we can count: golf. the kentucky derby. 25% of the world’s oil consumed by 5% of its population. the NBA playoffs. krispy kreme. x-men. rider mowers. air conditioning. second life. docker’s. timeshares in barbados. a 401(k). sport utility vehicles. wii fit. subprime mortgages. american idol.

someday I will dine at bobby’s mesa grill. if I’m really fortunate, he’ll be issuing me a throwdown for my culinary skills.

a boy can dream big dreams. and while I’m at it maybe I can dream about teaching someone to fish, not just how to make a killer tuna nacho.

[ statistics (c) 2008, Jesus Wants to Save Christians by Rob Bell ]